The development blog of the Indie game, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox.

Please note that all screen shots displayed in this blog are works in progress and in no way represent the appearance of the final game. Check out the main site here.

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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Things Will Be Great When You're Downtown!

So with the countrysides shaping up, we've been putting some real focus towards getting the procedural town generation happening, and a big part of that is procedurally generating the individual buildings...

So, after having a bit of a play around with town layout generators, we thought to ourselves "where's the first place you go when you reach a new town?" and right away we came to the conclusion of "the tavern, of course! For a hearty ale and a game of goblin dice!" (you'll learn more about goblin dice later)

So we decided to make our coding focus on taverns for the moment. So, to introduce the first tavern created by the game engine... May I present "The Slinky Buttercup"

This building was actually constructed by the game engine after we taught it how to build houses and threw it a few assets, and it looks pretty great for something that is relatively low poly:

So as you might notice, it's quite a small establishment, but the game has since made a couple of much larger (and more oddly shaped) taverns with names such as "The Swordsman's Doorway" and "The Curious Pumpernickel" (all of the names are also generated by the game)

You'll get to see the building interiors as soon as there's something to really show for it, but we CAN show you a VERY rough demo of the shop interaction planned for the game.

When you interact with shopkeepers of any kind in Malevolence, we've set up a system that is a direct nod to the RPGs of old such as Might & Magic. You can enter the shop, wander around, examine things, steal things (if you're so inclined) but when you talk to the proprietor, this interface will come up:

As a means of homage to the games Malevolence is re-imagining, no matter what town you go to, each interface for each shop type remains the same, so you will get familiar with them quickly. They also each have their own sound. The voice of the Tavern Keeper is none other than Australia's own David 'Aussieroth' Doyle!

So that's it for now. Soon we'll have videos of entire towns generating in the wilderness, and then we'll focus on showing you inside the buildings, and hopefully more shops, too! And working ones!
Until then, stay tuned on the social networks!